One day. I was putting on a hill in Zurich, and a few hundred yards away, Diana Ross was doing a sound test at an arena for a performance that night of 'Take My Breath Away,' my song with her. That was a very nice game, an incredible feeling.
All the signs were right. And when I mean all the sings were right, the only signs that we care about when we start a project of making a record is, do we have the songs - it's that simple.
Just with the basic one guitar, one piano and one vocal and an audience, I think that the intimacy comes through more. People feel much more connected to the song because there's nothing in the way, and I actually enjoy doing that.
I do get a bit of a sense, just from e-mails some people send me, just a little sense of how people in different countries seem to respond differently to certain lines in a song.
It's always interesting - how do you actually convey thought through song? We're used to the convention on stage. In film, we used to be used to it, and now sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You need to be fresh and really look at the mate...
Facing inward, join hands so as to form a small circle. Then, without moving from their places they sing the opening song, according to previous agreement, in a soft undertone.
More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.
It's from being melancholy and having my human down experiences that I learn, that I overcome, that I transform - and these realizations I put into song. That's what I choose to put in my backpack and carry with me around the world.
In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in the people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here in Los Angeles, there are less characters because they're all inside au...
Inside a song has always been the one place I'm most at home. Music never abused me, never made me sick never tried to kill me. Music is the one thing I can't afford to lose.
Back in the early '90s, I started going to Nashville to do a lot of co-writes. One of the first people I met there was Keith Follese. Keith and his wife Adrienne are both songwriters, and we wrote some songs together.
The job of singing is to stay open to the river of soul in all its manifestations, the dark and the light, without letting your ego get in the way. I never want to be bigger than the song. I just want you to receive it.
You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing - it was a feeling. The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?
The streets are silent / The playgrounds are still / The noise has moved elsewhere / Into our homes / Into our hearts / It’s been too long / Children are not where they belong / The streets, the playgrounds and the song / Have been waiting for too ...
So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why.
Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.
Although I'm a huge fan of Ben Kweller, I don't think I'd cover one of his songs, simply because there's just so much of my own stuff I wanna do.
I finished 'Beautiful Creature,' and I felt somewhat unfulfilled. I felt like this other side of me needed to be released. Some of the songs I left off the album weren't intense enough to be what I wanted. They weren't hard enough.
At the end of the day, if you don't have a record contract, a studio or a guitar, you can still write songs. You're still an artist. That's something no one can take away.
I mean, I could just go round and use session musicians for every song, but I don't find that helps when it comes to setting up a band for live. Derrick has been with me for donkey's years.
You always gotta reach the people who feel bad about themselves or insecure about themselves, and I think 'Like 'Em All' was just a perfect song for all the girls, and I think that's why it blew up like it did.
